A/N: And so begins my Fire Emblem oneshot collection! This will hopefully come to encompass a chapter per character on an issue or an idea that snags in my mind. Lyndis is naturally my first.

Names

Lyndis

Pride is one of the things that a Sacaean values most. Over pain, over prejudice, over even family and common sense. Sometimes over life. Pride is what forces the tired rider on into the endless plains.

And Lyndis of the Lorca has never been deemed worthy.

She did not realize this, not for years, until her childhood was beginning to slip away.

"I knew that the Lycian princess-" this is said in a way far different than her father's caressing tone- "would never bear a proper son of Sacae to guide the Lorca."

Though the tiny green-haired child knows that her father loves her- loves her more than the wind or his horse- she sees a spark of shame flicker in his eyes in these moments. It hurts in a deeper place than the words of cranky old women.

So she rides her horse better than any boy, she picks up swords instead of herbs, she tussles in dirt, lets the wind flow freely in her tied-back hair. And new shame is born alongside the praise.

"They call us the barbarians, yet that Lycian girl will never grow into an appropriate woman. Pretty as a wildflower, but still a weed."

Her hair grows long then, and she weaves and dances the tribal movements of old, and she waits until her chance to become the child that her father, the chieftain, needs.

Then everyone dies.

Her father's eyes will never watch her lead their people. Even the fragile remnants will not listen to her, the half-Lycian girl with the odd-sounding name who tries to fill a position that a female never should. So when the bloodstained traveler appears in his robes, darker green than the plains that she has known, her pride knows she must follow him and find new soil to plant itself in, to grow upon.

When the knights show themselves, she feels Father Sky breathing his luck and love upon her. Lyndis, daughter of Madelyn and Hassar, can be someone. Lyn of the Lorca is more than a chieftain's failed child, a lonely survivor; she is offered the opportunity to be a lady, to find a new family and new lands to fall in love with. Finally, men will listen to her, will follow her command.

She arrives, and Lyn realizes that the plains she's crossed, the borders she's surpassed, the men she's killed and bloodied her white hands with, have meant nothing. All have been leading her in a sickening circle, as surely as the sun arcs in the sky.

Lyn of Sacae is a tomboy, a savage, a young and foolish girl once more. The Lady Lyndis of Caelin cannot ride a horse in the same fashion, or do her swordplay, or even weave-something that used to be so feminine- to prove her prowess as a woman. So she cries in the library for hours as Lycians ten years younger write out words that she's never even heard before with letters she can barely scrawl. She holds in wracking sobs when her maids don't understand her accent, when nobles mock her for not knowing the difference between her forks, when she falls in love with a man she can't have, when her grandfather continues his slow and withering path to death. Lady Lyndis stands strong and tries to be proud.

Lyn of the Lorca is no more a survivor, no more alive, than the rest of her tribe.

It's hard to be proud when you feel that you are never enough, when you flail powerlessly in the dark to try and grip a sense of self, a sense of society, and you find nothing. She will always be trapped halfway, a Lady that prefers grass to jewels and the whispering wind to the golden fan she now pathetically rotates with one wrist.

Sometimes she hates, and she doesn't know who.

So when the castle falls under siege and the red-haired man arrives with a new fate to hand her, the Lady of Caelin is shamefully, horribly, repulsively relieved.

But then they claim victory in the face of the impossible. Lyndis of the Lorca cannot and will not rebuild the stone walls that suffocate her.

Sitting with her husband on the plains and watching the dry grass fade to the yellow and brown of winter, Lyndis knows that here, under the quiet of the open sky, there are no expectations, and no judgments. In a place where only the wind can touch her, where only the wind can whisper behind her back or push her to new heights. It is now, in the ripples of her shameful elopement back to her home with a man she cannot have and the abandonment of her own country, that Lyndis feels the proudest.